Despite the recent hype, we know that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t new. For years, businesses have been leveraging AI, in some capacity, to improve operational efficiency in a variety of areas. However, the growing sophistication of large language models (LLMs) has garnered warranted attention. Their more recent availability to the public through generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini has led businesses across industries to eagerly adopt these tools to enhance their operations.
In this three-part series, we’ll explore three use cases for AI in learning and development (L&D) — for content creation, assessments and coaching. This first article will explore AI’s impact on the content development process.
From Blank Slates to Working Outlines
As an L&D leader within the technology division of Deckers Brands, Samantha Straede, CPTM, was part of a project to upskill her organization on AI. To do so effectively, she started by taking a Coursera course on prompt engineering to learn more about writing generative AI prompts. Then, she began integrating what she learned into her workflow.
One way Straede has been using AI is to generate course outlines for proposed programs. Using ChatGPT or a similar tool, she will write a prompt explaining the course’s topic/subject matter, her key audience (i.e., learners’ job roles and industry) and her job role, and it will produce a course outline that she can then customize and refine.
Here’s an example of a generative AI prompt for creating a course outline:
I work as an L&D leader for a large, multinational pharmaceutical company. Please create a course outline for a three-day virtual instructor-led training program on the topic of giving feedback. The intended audience is mid-level managers working within the organization. The course should instill learners with the skills and knowledge they need to give effective feedback to employees that improves their performance.
After customizing and polishing the AI-generated outline, Straede can then present it to stakeholders to gain their buy-in and support for the proposed program, and to receive their initial feedback on the course.
The Need for Human Oversight
“As far as prototyping and getting much sooner feedback on your concepts, I think [AI] is fantastic,” Straede says. “I don’t recommend it being the only thing you use because there needs to be human oversight, obviously. There are concerns about it making mistakes.” However, AI “helps you get started and determine how you’ll eventually lay out the course and sequence key concepts.”
Josh Blank, president and chief product officer at OpenSesame, agrees that as of now content development should be a partnership between L&D professionals and AI: “I don’t think we’re at the point where we want to have AI building all of our courses for us. I don’t think that’s the right use of the tools [available] today.”
Streamlining the Content Development Process
Although AI-generated course outlines need to be reviewed and tweaked by a training professional, they’re still a game-changer. Busy L&D leaders no longer need to spend hours researching key concepts, interviewing subject matter experts (SMEs), and writing out course outlines that will eventually need to be adjusted based on feedback from key stakeholders and SMEs, anyways.
AI can help L&D professionals create “good enough” course outlines, faster. It provides them with a working course outline that they can present to SMEs for feedback and then make iterations as needed. Using AI to move away from blank slates and toward working course outlines can significantly speed up the content development process.
There are currently many AI course authoring tools on the market, such as Invince’s UpsideLMS, ELB Learning’s The Studio, iSpring Suite and many others. According to Training Industry’s e-book, “The AI Advantage in L&D: A Strategic Guide,” “AI-powered authoring tools can alleviate the task of content creation, freeing up valuable time and resources and allowing L&D teams to focus on refining and enriching the content.”
Personalized Learning Experiences
AI can also help curate more personalized training offerings for learners. AI-powered personalization tools guide training professionals through the process of pulling individual courses or modules on a given subject from their portfolio into a comprehensive, curated learning journey. It can also help flag courses or modules to remove from existing learning journeys according to an individual learner’s job role and development needs. This helps ensure that only the most job-relevant training is delivered to learners.
In practice, this might look like removing a module from a leadership development course on the topic of “Tips for First-Time Managers” if the audience is more experienced managers, and then adding that module to a learning journey designed for a first-time manager.
The endgame of tools that personalize learning is to release trainers from the need to manually curate content to meet the needs of any given learner, instead letting AI do the work.
Content Development for a Multilingual Audience
In today’s globally dispersed business environment, many learning leaders are tasked with training a multilingual audience. Thus, creating and delivering content in multiple languages is a common challenge for training professionals, Blank says. AI can help by building new content in multiple languages and by translating existing content into multiple languages quickly and at scale.
OpenSesame originally began developing its AI tool, Simon, a few years ago “when we saw the need to make the content consumption experience much better for the end learners and our publishing partners who are creating content,” Blank says. Through its AI-enabled translation capabilities, Simon is largely focused around simplifying the translation process for learning leaders.
“We’re big on empowering people to focus on what they do well, telling great stories and then letting the [AI] tools help present them to the world. That’s how Simon got started,” Blank says.
It’s important to note that training a multilingual audience requires effective translation and localization capabilities. Thus, by using AI-powered translation tools, learning leaders will have more time to focus on localization, which may need heavier human oversight to adjust for cultural differences and nuances in a given course.
AI-Generated Training Videos
For many training professionals, creating training videos has long been a time-consuming part of the job. If not available internally, it requires sourcing external voice actors, writing scripts and editing video content. AI-powered training video creation tools, like Synethsia, HeyGen, FlexClip AI and Hour One, enable learning leaders to create training videos quickly, with little to no video editing expertise.
These tools often can create training videos in multiple languages using a variety of lifelike avatars for a realistic learning experience.
What’s Next?
From creating course outlines to producing realistic training videos, AI is already helping L&D leaders streamline their content development efforts in myriad ways.
In the future, Straede says more opportunities for AI in L&D will arise. AI’s limitations, she says, will depend on your level of creativity, your company’s policies around AI use and your ability to identify use cases for AI in your job role and organization. “I think [AI] is going to allow people to really focus on what’s going to move the needle in their organization instead of just doing really manual, process-oriented tasks.”
There’s no doubt that AI is advancing at a rapid pace. To prepare for an AI-driven future, Blank says, “I think those of us who really take the time to learn, understand, and figure out how to harness them for good are going to be far ahead of our peers who either ignore them or dismiss them.”
Stay tuned for the next article in this three-part series on AI’s impact on L&D, which will explore AI-powered assessments.
